[Victorian Web Home —> Illustration —> Thomas Nast —> Pickwick Papers —> Charles Dickens —> Next]
Mr. Snodgrass
Thomas Nast
1873
composite woodblock engraving
4 1⁄16 inches wide by 5 ¼ inches high (10.4 cm wide by 13.6 cm high), framed, full-page;
Chapter LVII, "In which the Pickwick Club is finally dissolved, and every thing concluded to the satisfaction of every body," VI, 330.
[Click on image to enlarge it.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Mr. and Mrs. Snodgrass settled at Dingley Dell, where they purchased and cultivated a small farm, more for occupation than profit. Mr. Snodgrass, being occasionally abstracted and melancholy, is to this day reputed a great poet among his friends and acquaintance, although we do not find that he has ever written anything to encourage the belief. There are many celebrated characters, literary, philosophical, and otherwise, who hold a high reputation on a similar tenure. [Chapter 57, "In which the Pickwick Club is finally dissolved, and every thing concluded to the satisfaction of every body," VI, 330]
Right: Nast's earliest rendering of August Snodgrass, detail from And addressed the Club himself had founded (Chapter One). Centre: Phiz's thumbnail of Snodgrass dancing with Emily Wardle, in the Christmas Eve at Mr. Wardle's (January 1837). Left: Seymour's original conception of Snodgrass, left of Pickwick, with Winkle in the foreground: Mr. Pickwick Addresses the Club (April 1836).
Dickens only lays the groundwork for developing the character of Augustus Snodgrass, because, even though the hapless romantic is a founding members of the Pickwick Club introduced in the first chapter, Dickens does little to develop this Romantic poser. At the initial meeting of the Pickwick Society, Snodgrass assumes the mantle of official poet and deputy-leader: "On the left of his great leader sat the poetic Snodgrass" (I, 10). By the closing pages of the novel Snodgrass apparently still has written no poetry, or at least nothing that he has read to others. At the substantial farm of Dingley Dell in rural Kent, he falls in love with and eventually marries Emily Wardle.
What is a mere passing comment in the 1837 serial becomes the basis for a significant illustration — the last full-scale, captioned illustration in the book — as Nast visually winds up the affairs of the club and the principal Pickwickians: the reward for virtue and fidelity to the leader is (Nast intimates) the leisure to contemplate one's past and think about how to write about it as one looks out of the window at the arboreal scenery. Like the illustrators of the British and American Household Edition, the artist places the human figure well in the foreground, merely sketching a few significant props such as the writing desk and background details such as the leaded-pane window, ornate inkwell, and overcharged wastepaper basket. Nothing that the poet attempts is good enough for him. Other than the suggested anguish at suffering writer's block signified by the hand clutching the forehead, Nast presents Snodgrass himself without much distortion, in a sympathetic portrait rather than as a caricature on one of the very few full-page plates.
In order to help readers identify the the middle-aged would-be writer in the last chapter, Nast shows him in profile to match Snodgrass's profile in the illustration of the club in chapter one, And addressed the club himself had founded (p. 11), although Nast has suitably aged Snodgrass in this final illustration. Surprisingly, Nast devotes an entire page to a secondary character who receives only a short paragraph in the final chapter. However, given Snodgrass's importance as the supposed amanuensis of some of the interpolated short stories, Nast may have conceived Snodgrass, the incipient writer, as representing Charles Dickens the author, who married the pretty, vivacious young Scot, Catherine Hogarth, in April 1836 — just as the first number of Pickwick appeared in print.
According to Nast, Snodgrass's problem may be an over-imaginative approach to writing in which he conceives of much but writes little, and, when he does write, feels quite dissatisfied with his production — a point Nast indicates by the large, overflowing waste-paper basket. He writes at a beautiful desk and sits on a magnificent chair, both of which are sure signs of affluence; the garden scene over which he looks should afford complete tranquility; and he has the leisure necessary to write during daylight hours. Nevertheless, unlike his creator Dickens, he find himself perpetually afflicted with writer's block. After Pickwick, Dickens often wrote under very different circumstances, with the noise of the household continually vying for his attention, or sitting at his desk late into the night.
Dickens, Charles. Pickwick Papers. Illustrated by Robert Seymour and Hablot Knight Browne. London: Chapman & Hall, 1836-37.
_______. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. The Household Edition. 16 vols. Illustrated by Thomas Nast. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1873. VI.
_______. Pickwick Papers. Illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne ('Phiz'). The Household Edition. 22 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1874. VI.
Last modified 7 June 2020